I think we all agree that bishops are under-represented, underpowered and pale in comparison to lay barons in CK2. The fact that they pop up out of the blue, that you can't trace their life or lineage, or that they're usually lowborn, all these things burn my eyes.

All this should be looked into, although I can see it's a hard thing to fix or "make up". However, there's a thing that comes much easier and that I'd like to see taken care of: where there were no bishops, let's just put no religious baronies. Monasteries, sure there were monasteries, but their role was not exactly the same in all places. For instance, Ireland had weird abbot-bishops, yes. And some abbots and priors were so rich and powerful that all that made them different from bishops was that they might be a bit more religious. Might.

This came to me when making a barony list for Foix. There's no bishop in Foix and I could not find any big monastery to take its role. So Foix is left without bishop or religious barony. I think it's only fair, since we can make it up with an extra barony for Foix, while keeping the count of Foix wishing for a bishopric... which did happen. All those counts asking the Pope for a bishop of their own, that's historical. And expensive too. I take the "build a barony" thing as a payment to the Pope in order to recognise your right to a bishop at your side.

Well that's the recurring problem with the holding system. Some counties in France have no bishopric while others can't even represent half of them. The whole Auvergne for example is covered by only one bishopric while Provence (which we split into several entities but was one county at the time) has a dozen bishoprics and archbishoprics, and that's not counting the great abbeys like Sénanque and Lérins.

We had something planned for the religious orders and the abbeys and monasteries are now identified as such by title, so there's no rush in removing minor ecclesiastical holdings, they'll serve a purpose in the long run. I know a few counties in southern France still won't even have any abbey or monastery, so those shouldn't get a starting one but that's all we can do. The game restrictions will force filling the gap during the game even if there wasn't a starting religious holding there.

CK2's representation of holdings is a simplistic view which split the various powers of any political entity into separate centers while we all know here that the reality was often quite the opposite : with major cities often assuming all three of those roles by themselves (and sometimes barely anything worth representing around them like we are forced to in this system).